Free Ebook: The Rules of Attraction – An SME Introduction to Content Marketing

In today’s digital age, content is everything. That means if it’s not your content that your customers are consuming, it’s your competitors. To help NZ business owners understand the basics of content marketing and digital strategy, we’ve created a free ebook which you can download below.

Here at #nzentrepreneur we get to see, hear and work with an amazing array of inspiring entrepreneurs and innovative Kiwi businesses. We eat, sleep and breathe entrepreneurship and we love it!

But the biggest problem we see time and again, is Kiwi business owners with great products and services falling behind because they don’t understand how to market their business in this new digital age.

According to a new whitepaper “The State of SME” released recently by Business Mentors New Zealand, 91% of business leaders agree that more should be done to help upskill SME’s (“small and medium sized enterprises”) in this area.

So why are we falling behind in an area that was once considered quite straightforward? After all, it wasn’t so long ago that marketers were often referred to as the “colouring-in department”.

The answer is that the rules of marketing have changed more in the last four years than they have in the last 40.

Thanks to the Internet, today’s buyers are more in control of “the sale” than ever before. They now have all the information they need to compare options and make a buying decision at the click of a mouse button.

This has made them intolerant of traditional advertising-based marketing techniques and pushy sales tactics. As a result businesses need to be a lot smarter about how they engage with customers.

Social media, email marketing, SEO, remarketing, PPC… what does it all mean and where do you begin? When even full time marketers struggle to master all the different tactics and disciplines in the modern marketing mix, it’s no wonder that our time and resource poor SME’s are falling behind.

But the fact is that a strategy known as “content marketing” underpins nearly all other online marketing and inbound marketing tactics. Research shows that 81% of today’s buyers perform online research before buying, and businesses that produce consistent, quality content are shown to enjoy an average of 7.8 times more site traffic, with sales conversion rates nearly six times higher.

This means that unless we have a digital strategy and an online presence that enables us to be found, and to build trust with potential customers by providing the information and inspiration they are looking for, they are unlikely to choose to engage with us, let alone buy from us.

Sample Page “The Rules of Attraction”- Page 19

To help all Kiwi business owners understand the basics of content marketing and why it is so important in today’s marketplace, #nzentrepreneur and our publishers Espire Media have written a free, easy-to-read ebook, using “plain English” not marketing speak. In it you’ll also find a free checklist for creating your own simple SME content marketing programme.